Review Summary

Terrorism is stupid. Terrorists are stupid. It seems to me that these truths have not been sufficiently acknowledged, especially by movies, which tend to imagine terrorists as the diabolically clever authors of complicated conspiracies. But surely the recent historical record suggests that for every extremist mastermind scheming in a cave somewhere, there are innumerable stooges, fools and copycats, their dreams of glory tethered to half-baked ideas and harebrained plots. Incompetence married to zeal is hardly benign — dumb people have done their share of damage in the world — but it can nonetheless be funny. These musings are inspired by “Four Lions,” a shockingly hilarious, stiletto-sharp satire directed by Chris Morris and written by a squad of British wits. It concerns a squad of British nitwits eager to wage jihad and unsure of just how to go about doing it. That there are five of them in a movie called “Four Lions” is testament either to their aggregate brain power or to their mathematical skills, though it is also true that one of the group is subtracted by an incident of premature martyrdom involving a sheep. Shot in a jerky, low-budget style just a few steps removed from the inflammatory Web videos its characters try to make, “Four Lions” is unsparing and yet also curiously affectionate. — A. O. Scott